books reviews

Sea and Sardinia

Book: Sea and Sardinia
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN 13: 978-0141180762

'Travel seems to me a splendid lesson in disillusion' DH Lawrence in a letter to Mary Cannan.

DH Lawrence went to Sardinia in 1921. He spent 9 days on the island with his wife Frieda (the queen bee, or q-b); and they travelled by train from Cagliari in the South, up to Terranova in the North East to where they caught the ferry back to Sicily, their then home. On returning, Lawrence 'had nothing to do' so wrote the manuscript of Sea and Sardinia in 6 weeks - and all from memory, as he claimed not to have taken a single note whilst travelling. All of which makes it an odd read: it's both badly researched and self-obsessed and yet hugely revealing and lit from within by Lawrence's monumental and unsettled questing ego.

Lawrence and his missus had been beached in Sicily for some time; and from from his diaries and letters of the time it's evident that they felt somehow trapped by the weight of culture there - Sicily's very ancientness and superabundance of cultural artefacts weren't a balm but an irritant. He felt a sense of atrophy in the presence of so many things, and longed to step outside the great tunnel of history. And to Lawrence, Sardinia was just this - outside of history, forgotten and Other; and in it's ancient granite boulders and primitive way of life, Lawrence seemed to see a way back to some purer, older consciousness - the possibility of setting in motion what he called a 'process of rediscovering backwards...down the old ways of time.' It seems he also thought he might find in it a place to settle, to be free of the ceaseless urge towards motion - a place to be still.

And in many ways, despite this underlying theme of atavism, the book really is nothing more than a hymn to kinesis and the act of travel. Once you've absorbed the outright weirdness of Lawrence's obsession with the ancient and his hysterical (if consistent) responses to certain scenic landmarks (his gagging thrall in the face of Mt. Eryx is almost Hammer Horror in its camp hyperbole) then he becomes a great, if slightly unsettling travelling companion. The route he and Frieda take - a kind of anti-tourist route through the cragged mountainous heartlands that even today are remote and rarely visited - means the visions are filled with a certain elusive magic. His descriptions of his fellow travellers on the various trains he and the queen bee take, the peasants in their costumes that spark yet more atavistic reveries, the granite of the mountains which send him back to his beloved Cornwall - these are the things that stick in the mind.

They didn't settle in Sardinia, of course; and much of that which he sought in the ancient and the remote was what appalled and enraged him. In the end Sardinia became just another stopping off place, yet more proof of Lawrence's search for the impossible - that which would provide him with a sense of calm stasis. As Clive James has said of him, 'he was in search of...a significance this world does not supply and has never supplied'.

Finally then, whatever one makes of Lawrence, the real power of the book is in the wonder of his ecstatic prose. For epiphanic moments like this:

Wonderful to go out on a frozen road, to see the grass in shadow bluish with hoar-frost, to the grass in the yellow winter-sunrise beams melting and going cold-twinkly. Wonderful the bluish, cold air, and things standing up in the cold distance. After two southern winters, with roses blooming all the time, this bleakness and this touch of frost in the ringing morning goes to my soul like an intoxication. I am so glad on this lonely naked road, I don't know what to do with myself. I walk down in the shallow grassy ditches under the loose stone walls, I walk on the little ridge of glass, the little bank on which the wall is built, I cross the road across the frozen cow-droppings; and it is all so familiar to my feet, my very feet in contact, that I am wild as if I have made a discovery.

Posted by poacher in books reviews at 20:17 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

The Wild Places

Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places has become something of a node for me in recent months - that special kind of book that seems to expand and fill space, throwing out ideas and experiences, prompting explorations of places and books. When I first finished it back in February I had an almost insatiable hunger to be outside; and I was driven to lookat things, look at them narrowly, trying to pierce some secret thrum beneath the surface of things. Like Annie Dillard, Macfarlane has the amazing ability to make you see again - partly because of some vicarious thrill at his own almost hallucinatory clarity of vision and ability to translate this into prose, but also because of the way you return to the source, re-examine things you realise you hadn't truly looked at in years, if ever.

The other function of this node has been how The Wild Places has directed my reading. Macfarlane includes a bibliography in the book (as he does in Mountains of The Mind) - an item of intense allure and repulsion for the likes of me. So I have found myself in dusty corners with obscure books (I got a copy of Ted Hughes Wodwo through the post just yesterday, evidently from the library of a heavy smoker if the yellowing pages and tobacco-stink are anything to go by), half-crazed on steepling hangars in the grey glow of dusk dredging up incantations from the journals of Gilbert White, and looking up into the crowns of great trees wondering at the secret lives of the canopy...

All of this is of course, by way of avoiding a review, to urge you to go out and get a copy, and of course to climb a tree and forget everything for a while. It's also to recommend two recent pieces which are loosely adapted from The Wild Places and available elsewhere. This, from the chapter on Holloways which he explores with the inimitable Roger Deakin, and also this short piece on freshwater swimming which is over at the very excellent Caught By The River.

Posted by poacher in books reviews at 14:26 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

Martin Strel

Martin Strel swims. For miles. As of now he has swum the Danube, the Parana (South America's second longest river), the mighty Yangtze and the Amazon. Yes, the Amazon - all 3,278 miles of it. That was 30,000 strokes in every 10 hour day, and for 67 days without a day off. He wore a wet suit to protect himself against snakes, spiders, mosquitoes, poisonous insects and microbes, not to mention the candiru, a worm that has designs on swimming up your urethra and lodging itself there with miniature spikes. It is furiously territorial once attached and can only be removed with it's brand new home. He got third degree burns from the sun. He was smeared in vaseline to protect cuts and grazes and so to ward off hungry piranhas.

The obvious thing to scream is WHY? And Strel, like many extreme adventurers, seems largely unable to answer the question. In a way I guess the deed itself is at once a eloquent response to some greater question that resides inside the man himself. Something we can never be party to. There are two recent articles on Strel that are worth a look even if they rather lamely attempt to answer the very same question. A piece in the New York Times and this piece, in which Sam Wollaston swam a stretch of the Thames with Strel which was in the Guardian magazine a few weekends ago...




Book: Roger Deakin - Waterlog
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN 13: 978-0099282556

And speaking of swimming I recently finished Roger Deakin's marvellous book, Waterlog, which is an exploration of Britain via it's waterways - its ponds, lakes, canals, lochs, moats, the sea. In the book, Deakin, a profoundly ecologically minded man, and a passionate advocate of fresh and saltwater swimming, sets out from his moat in Suffolk to swim across Britain and gain what he calls a 'frog's eye view' of things.

In many ways, the book is like a mirror image of Jonathan Raban's Coasting in which Raban takes to the sea looking to gain some perspective on Britain from afar, and also in a quest for some wilderness, some escape. Yet if Raban is running from something (Raban is always running from something), Deakin's journey is less a flight away as much as a flight inward - both in terms of his immersal in the waterscape of the country and a gently melancholic exploration of himself and what he is capable of. While Deakin is often within shouting distance of a major town or city, what he finds whilst paddling along streams and rivers is that he is quite detached and in a strong sense wild. And whether he is floating above old field margins in the sea between Cornwall and the Scilly Isles or bravely exploring the epic waterways and ditches near the Denver Sluice in the Fens he is always seeing with a humming intensity, logging the landscape and in Keats' phrase 'taking part in the existence of things'. Whilst I may not exactly be stripping my keckers off and jumping in the Solent any time soon, what Waterlog does is make you look again, see the world with newly focused eyes which is the greatest praise you can give any form of art.


Denver Sluice

I came to Deakin through this beautiful elegy by Robert Macfarlane, which I read a couple of years ago soon after Deakin had passed away. I was captivated by the way Macfarlane had portrayed Deakin and the way in which he lived - his tumbledown house with its moat, its wild hedges and swallows in the chimney; his timber framed car with moss in the seat wells; his many outhouses with writing desks and rickety beds which he would routinely spend nights in. Deakin is like a living presence in Macfarlane's beautiful book, The Wild Places and in many ways, the book is very much about Deakin, or at least what he seemed to embody. It's such a shame that he passed away when he did because he seemed to come to writing late and if Waterlog (and his second book, the recently published Wildwood) is anything to go by he had so much to tell.

There is a piece by Deakin over at Open Democracy a teaser for Waterlog. I hope and pray every time I walk through the water meadows in Winchester to see a someone in trunks and goggles arrowing through the water, but as yet I remain unfulfilled. There is also links over at the very fine Caught By The River to two fabulous radio shows Deakin did for Radio 4 .

Lastly, Loudon Wainwright's The Swimming Song is so deeply enmeshed in Waterlog, and in Deakin's life (the song was played at his funeral) that I just had to include it here.

Download: Loudon Wainwright III - The Swimming Song

Listen:

Posted by poacher in books reviews at 13:42 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Mt. Everest, moon

Into Thin Air is an account of the disastrous Everest assault by various teams of climbers in the May of 1996 during which 15 lives were lost. Krakauer, a renowned climber himself, had joined Rob Hall's Adventure Consultant's team as a reporter for Outisde Magazine initially only to report from Base Camp on the team's progress and also to focus on the rampant commercialism which had turned Everest into part playground, part rubbish dump; but Krakauer eventually managed to get himself a place in the full climbing party and took the chance to fulfil what he admits was a lifetime's ambition to stand on the roof of the world.

The book, written as both an attempt at catharsis and as a more complete account than was possible in the already long article which had appeared in Outside magazine, is a troubled, troubling gaze into an abyss. Written from under a dense blanket of grief, Into Thin Air attempts to honestly portray what Krakauer saw and how events conspired to bring about the calamitous death toll: too many climbers, too much ambition, weather of unbelievable ferocity and the debilitating effects of the harshest of environments and extreme altitude all combined to create impossibly cataclysmic conditions. The narrative, divested of any of the joy of climbing or rapturous descriptions of the surroundings so common to much mountain literature, is a horribly compelling slow, graphic descent into a nightmare so horrific as to seem beyond the bounds of possibility. You leave it shattered.

The initial article and the book that followed created a deal of controversy on publication as many people (including relatives of those that died on the mountain) felt that Krakauer had harshly treated some and apportioned blame where none was merited. This was partly due to the amount of speculation Krakauer was driven to indulge in to fill in the gaps in his own story, but also because in many senses, beyond a certain point, Krakauer was the archetypal unreliable narrator: severely physically debilitated and half mad with hypoxic dementia could any of the recreations of the later stages of the climb be in any way considered reliable? The exchanges that followed are available on the Outisde website and are worth a look to get some idea of the controversy involved. Anatoli Boukreev, a guide on Scott Fischer's team whom Krakauer criticised for what he saw as went as negligent behaviour to clients he was supposed to be looking after, went far as to write a book in response - The Climb.


Mt. Everest, storm

Whatever you think of the integrity of Krakauer's account there is no denying its elemental power and there is a certain macabre allure to the whole thing - both in terms of the events on the mountain itself and in the threshings of a mind coping with the awful workings of trauma. It is a book that stays with you, and even now looking through the swathes of images of Everest available on line, in books, there is a screaming horror just below the surface of things, encased in the immensity of all that blackened rock and in the creakings of the deep, tense ice.

Also:

Mt. Everest at Summit Post
Radio interview with Krakauer at NPR
Salon piece on the controversy surrounding Into Thin Air

Posted by poacher in books reviews at 21:46 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

A Misguide to Anywhere

Book: A Mis-Guide to Anywhere
Publisher: Wrights & Sites
ISBN 13: 978-0954613013

In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit calls walking ‘the most obvious and the most obscure thing in the world’; and it is: at once quotidian and functional yet – and more so now than ever before - oddly subversive and hidden. Suburban and particularly urban life doesn’t encourage walking, or at least it doesn’t encourage a certain kind of walking – any beyond the purely functional; we’re funnelled, corralled, caged by streets and architecture, driven by lines of force between our cattle trucks and our homes, dissuaded from nomadic revelries and haphazard acts of discovery. We don’t map, recreate, these spaces, they map, create us. So that’s why the alternative radical history of walking, that which is still coming into being, is one that relies on metaphors of disappearance and misplacement, alchemy and dream states – ancient methods of (re)discovery transposed into the most modern of settings. Learning to get lost so that you might find your, or another, way

The Wrights & Sites collective are a group of artists and pranksters based in Exeter who formed in 1997 and whose core remit is to produce multi-media site-specific explorations of space and place. They (they being Stephen Hodge, Simon Persighetti, Phil Smith and Cathy Turner) began by focusing much of their attention on their home town of Exeter, going as far as to produce a mutated guidebook to the city that suggested ‘a series of walks and points of observation and contemplation’ – a Mis-Guide, a distorted method of exploring the familiar. But this site-specificity had obvious limitations and the group wondered ‘towards the end of 2003…whether they might make a ‘Mis-Guide’ that deliberately set out to provide transferable ideas… in this case, the work will be completed by the walker and will become specific to its location only in the walking (we intend ‘walk’ to be interpreted as journey, hop, skip, jump, negotiate on wheels etc. as appropriate to circumstances and mood)’. Essentially what the group intended was a portable Mis-Guide with enough broad thematic content to enable it to be adapted to any city, town or suburb anywhere in the world.

The artefact they have produced (I’m loathe to call it a book because it longs to be separated from itself, torn apart and left in underpasses and dank stairwells) is firmly based in this alternative tradition of walking and travel. This Mis-Guide to Anywhere can be ‘used’ ‘anywhere you can walk slowly down the street without being shot by Western contractors. Anywhere you can reorganise buildings without permission. Anywhere you can stand still without being questioned. Anywhere you find abandoned beds. Anywhere the movie you always wanted to see is playing. Anywhere you legged it’ and as such is a portable manifesto for ‘disrupted walking’ is a ‘utopian project for the recasting of a bitter world’. The artefact itself is thin, ring bound; the polished pages adorned with soft-focus photographs, the familiar rendered unfamiliar, radical discontinuities; each of the 115 pages offers a different disruptive method of walking (Follow your shadow. Repeat at different times of the year, and at different distances from the equator) or a statement of fact (I walked for three hours in London between the Strand and Monument and I did not see one child). It seeks to make and return the cities and blank suburbs we inhabit into the labyrinths and playgrounds they are; and by enabling you to get lost in them to rediscover what you might not have known or simply what you might have forgotten. It’s a reclamation of a space that is already ours.


Situationists

In terms of influence it is the Situationists who loom largest. Guy Debord had seen a map in a book called Paris et l’agglomeration parisienne in which the movements of a 16 year old girl had been mapped. Her life fell between the three points of a triangle – her home, her school and the home of her piano teacher – and there was little deviation outside this strict geometric cage. Debord was horrified and outraged ‘at the fact that anyone’s life could be so pathetically limited’. Thus the idea of the derive was developed a ‘technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances’ in which ‘one or more persons during a certain period’ is to ‘drop their relations, their work and all other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there’. In other words practice a freedom of movement otherwise discouraged by everyday living, and in doing so achieve a certain kind of mental state – a state that was at once exploratory and political but also playful and childlike, (indeed Debord compared it to the method of free association in psychoanalysis )- which could open up new areas of possibility.

The Situationist literature and mythology, saturated with metaphors of mixture, of recombination, involves the using of a kind of thaumaturgy of travel to rearrange place, subtle methods of navigation unlocking new possibilities and new layers of meaning – all modes of separating and splitting the horror of totality, an aspect of capitalist society that Debord abhorred. The Mis-Guide is very much part of this transcendent urge, using, in Jean-Cristophe Bailly’s memorable phrase, ‘the generative grammar of the legs’ to subvert this totality and to create narratives on the hoof.


City as dressing up box

The question that has to be asked of this artefact is: what do we do with it? In some respects it is hard to ascertain what level it is pitched at. Is this a manifesto, a subversive document designed to politicise and aggravate; or is it a pamphlet conceived with play in mind, gentle groups ambling across the cities of the world pointing out hitherto unexplored objects, monuments? Does it matter? I’m not so sure about its political aims, at least not on a macro level – there aren’t riots trapped between these glossy pages; but on a micro level there is a sense of a minor personal politics at work, concerned with what Michel de Certeau called ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’, the instilling of a rigorous sense of discovery that penetrates to the core of the seemingly most banal and obvious aspects of day to day life. There is, in a sense, a liberatory knowledge in simply paying attention to what you do most often, and this slim volume provides myriad ways of doing just that. What intrigues me - and it’s what it doesn’t tell me – is what to do next

Some Radical Walking Resources

Wright's & Sites 'A Manifesto for a New Walking Culture: Dealing with the City'
Guy Debord's 'Theory of the Derive'
Debord's 'Introduction to A Critique of Urban Geography'
Ivan Chtcheglov's 'Formulary for a New Urbanism'
Henry David Thoreau's 'Walking'
An excerpt from Sadie Plant's 'The most radical gesture: The Situationist International in a postmodern age'
Mary Zourzani's 'Walking with the Surrealists'
Donna Landry 'Radical Walking'
Flaneur.org
Richard Long
The Arcades Project Project

Posted by poacher in books reviews at 17:21 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)